


And Finally a Love Story

by sparkk



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, Jealousy, M/M, Smut, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-13 18:49:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7982296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparkk/pseuds/sparkk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Styles wakes up one evening to discover he's in a world famous boy band, his best friend wants nothing to do with him, and his fiancé is not actually his fiancé. It doesn't take long for him to decide he wants no part of this world. </p><p>The one where AU!Harry wakes up in canon!Harry's body, and will do whatever it takes to get back to his own world, because frankly, this one sucks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Finally a Love Story

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! I know some of you are waiting on an update from my other two stories, and I promise the updates are coming. I really appreciate your patience, and I promise I'll be updating those fics soon!
> 
> As for this story, the idea came to me while I was driving home from work the other day. It's based off of my favorite poem, "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem" by Bob Hicok. You can read the poem if you want, but it might spoil you as to the direction the story will go. This story is a real challenge for me because I'm trying to keep everyone, minus Harry, as in character as I can while reacting to a very different Harry Styles. There were a couple directions I was thinking of going with this story, some extremely angsty, but I finally settled on an ending, so never fear, this story will be updated regularly. The first part is short because it's setting the story up, but future parts will be much longer.
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to read - Enjoy! :)

__**My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers  
** **of my palms tell me so.  
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish  
at the same time.**

It’s Zayn’s fault. It is, because Harry remembers his last words, and they were, “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

Those aren’t the kind of words someone says when everything is okay, and when Harry breathes in deeply before opening his eyes, things are definitely not okay. 

For one thing, the ceiling is the wrong color. It’s dark enough in the room that he can’t really tell _what_ color it is, but he knows it should be red, a deep apple red, and it’s definitely not red. 

The blanket is wrong, as are the windows and the carpet flooring, and the table beside the bed, the lamp that glows dimly when he switches it on. Everything, everything is wrong.

His head hurts. He runs his hand through his hair and it keeps going, his hair reaching past his shoulders and that’s wrong. Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, his toes sink into thick carpet instead of hitting hardwood. And that’s when he sees strange ink on his hands, that’s definitely not just from a pen.

“Lou, what the shit happened babe?” he groans out. His voice is the same, his throat doesn’t hurt, his mouth tastes fine—ruling out a night of too much drinking. But those words, in Zayn’s voice, keep reverberating through his pounding head and none of this makes sense.

 _Everything’s gonna be okay_.

“Babe, seriously, my head’s killin’, what happened?” He looks behind him, eyes scanning the enormous bed. It’s empty.

He won’t let confusion turn to panic, not quite yet, but his heart jumps to his throat as the first niggling of worry starts to pool in his stomach. He wonders briefly if this is a hotel room—it’s certainly fancy enough. But it’s all way too fancy for anything he and Louis could afford and it also looks to have too many personal touches to be a sterile hotel room.

He stands, noting that his legs feel fine. The furniture is all dark wood, the windows dark showing it’s still night. He sweeps his gaze across the expanse of the room and comes to the conclusion that someone must have kidnapped him.

There are two doors in the room. Slowly, hesitating as though someone is waiting on the other side to nix him, Harry goes to the one closer to him, on the opposite side of the bed. Opening it and flicking the switch reveals a bathroom. A very white bathroom.

But it’s not the abstract art or lavender potpourri that catches his attention. It’s his face. Or rather, _not_ his face.

“What the actual fuck,” he mutters, stepping closer to the mirror slowly, as though the reflection might run away. “No way. No _fucking_ way.”

That’s his face—but that’s not his hair, and that’s not his body. In only his pants, he sees dark ink smattering his body. An odd moth on his stomach; birds near his clavicles; a heart—both real and fake, down his arm. In fact his left arm is just covered in ugly scribbles, and all he can think is how the fuck he got so many tattoos in one day.

And his hair—how did his hair get to that length? It’s curly and unruly, having just gotten out of bed, but in all his life Harry Styles has never sported hair that length. He fists it in both hands, tugging harshly at the strands because perhaps it’s all fake and he can yank it off. But like the tattoos permanently littering his skin, the hair remains on his scalp.

_Everything’s gonna be okay._

After a quick turn around in front of the mirror to confirm that yes, he’s got a ton of tattoos everywhere, including his goddamn ankles, Harry breathes in rapidly several times. It only takes a moment to decide that he can’t deal with this all right now, not by himself, and he wants, _needs_ , to find Louis.

On the small chance he has been kidnapped, Harry refrains from shouting out the older boy’s name in a panic. He stumbles out of the bathroom and realizes there’s a phone charging on the table beside the bed. It’s not his phone, but he doesn’t care, because he’s calling the fucking police and getting the fuck outta Oz before he starts to really scare himself.

The phone, of course, is password protected. He tries 1234 and 0000 even though he doubts they’ll work. He tries 0201, his birthday, thinking maybe some stalker took him, but again, no luck. He types random numbers for a minute but after several tries the phone locks him out and that’s that. Not even the background picture gives him any clues because it’s just a generic one of a crooked nighttime city skyline. 

Despite having no luck with the phone, he keeps it clutched in his hand as he opens the other door, walking out into a lit hallway. 

He barely notices the expensive art decorating the walls as he hurries down the staircase, looking around. But it’s just a house. Not a hideout or some secret lair. Just a fancy house with white walls and expensive decorations.

“Louis?!” he calls out loudly, not caring at this point. “Baby? You there?” He finds his way into the kitchen, turning on the lights to a tasteful, well stocked kitchen.

But it remains silent, no answer, and that is answer enough to tell Harry wherever he is, he’s alone.

 _Where the fuck am I? What’s going on? Did Zayn drug me or something?_

A swirl of thoughts race through his mind. The panic he’d been trying to hold off slowly claws its way up. He clutches the phone tighter in his hand.

When he spots a landline on the countertop, Harry doesn’t waste a second before grabbing it and dialing. He knows the police should be his first call, but dials Louis’ number first, his fear split between fear for himself and fear for the missing older boy.

It rings a half dozen times before hitting voicemail, but the voice belongs to a woman, definitely not Louis. Harry hangs up and doesn’t let himself dwell on that, instead dialing his mom’s number next. It’s the same deal, a voicemail belonging to some strange woman that isn’t his mom.

After that it’s a frantic dialing of every number he has memorized; Gemma, his friends, his cousins. None of the numbers go to the right voicemails, if the call goes through at all. By the time he’s run through every number he knows, Harry feels sick with dread.

He falls into a chair at the table. In his left hand is the cell phone, in his right, the wireless landline. Neither offer any answers to his problem.

_Everything’s gonna be okay._

Well it bloody well isn’t, that’s for sure.

xx xx

Harry ransacks the house, more or less, trying to find clues that will help him figure out what the hell is going on. He's beyond imagining this to be some silly prank, because no prank could be this elaborate, and frankly, after rummaging through piles of mail, stacks of papers, and shelves of books, he comes to the conclusion that he absolutely Does Not Like what he finds.

For one thing, _it's him_. It really is. It doesn't look like him in the pictures exactly, every single one sports a Harry Styles covered in tattoos and with ever lengthening hair, but he recognizes it as _his_ face, because it is. He sees himself with Louis, and Zayn, and two other guys he doesn't recognize, among pictures of him with his mom and sister. 

And the mail is all addressed to _Harry Styles_ , but what scares him more than anything else is that the address on each envelope is to an American one. It leads him to the final conclusion that he's not even in England anymore, but Los Angeles of all places. Harry has no idea how the fuck he got to LA. He's never been outside England really, let alone having ever gone all the way across the pond.

One after another each puzzle piece is revealed to him, but the full picture remains a mystery. What is he doing here? How did he get here? What, exactly, is going on? And why couldn't he get Zayn's voice out of his head? Since he woke up it's been an almost constant litany of _Everything's gonna be okay_ , which is stupid because things are certainly not okay, no matter how many times Harry tries to tell himself they are - or that they will be.

He tries the cell phone again around midnight, but it's frustratingly still locked. He found an address book - but it was empty, so of absolutely no help, just like everything else in the house.

Above all though, what Harry worries about most is the disturbing absence of his fiance. Love-of-his-life Louis Tomlinson - he's seen him in pictures in albums and on the wall looking about as different from _his_ Louis as the Harry he sees, but he tries his best not to dwell on appearances, wanting just to find Louis first before anything. Harry convinces himself that everything will be okay as long as Louis is there to help him figure things out, because there's no doubt in his mind that if anyone can figure this shit out, it will be Louis. But first, Harry has to track him down, which proves a lot easier said than done.

Harry tires himself out searching the house top to bottom trying to figure things out, coming out empty. Eventually he's too tired to keep his eyes open anymore and ends up flopping down on the couch. But despite how tired he'd felt, sleep eludes him, thoughts continuing to race.

Theory one, he thinks, is that this is some big joke. Elaborate as fuck, sure, but not _totally_ out of the realm of possibility he supposes. After a few more minutes of mulling over it though, he mentally scratches the idea out, realizing just how impossible it would be to.

Theory two, he considers next, and it's disturbing to think of, is that he's either woken up with amnesia from an accident, which he doesn't think is likely since he would've woken up in a hospital, not some home, or he's woken up in a different world from his. In this world he's apparently rich, Louis stays out of the house well into the night before coming home, he has friends he doesn't even recognize, and he's got tattoos from head to toe, 90% of which he has no idea what significance they could hold.

He doesn't like theory number two very much. It scares him shitless to think he's in some random dimension, or world, or alternate universe of some sort. He doesn't know if he even believes in that kind of thing; it seems too unreal perhaps? Unscientific? There has to be a more logical, scientific based explanation for what's going on. 

But with no other clues forthcoming, and no other theories to ruminate on, alternate universe is the theory he goes with.

He wonders, for one insane moment, if maybe this world has magic in it, like real, true witches and wizards kind of magic. But that seems even more unlikely than his alternate universe theory, so no point driving himself crazy thinking about the possibilities.

For all his thinking though, Harry remains where he's been since he woke up in this strange world - Unknowing of where he - and his fiance are; confused how he got there; and what exactly he should do next. 

He realizes he's kind of fucked until he can get in contact with someone he knows - someone he _trusts_. He doubts telling just anyone that he doesn't remember any of this life and that he thinks he's from a different universe would come across well. At best they might take him to the hospital, and at worst well…they'll probably take him to hospital anyway.

Other than some confusion though, Harry finds he's not injured in any way. Nothing aches, nothing pains him, he's not sore or hoarse. Despite the drastically different appearance, Harry's voice remains the same low timbre and he's still as clumsy as he was before he woke up in this strange world.

He wants his mom. He wants Louis and he wants his mom, to tell him that he just has to close his eyes, and things will be back to normal. But he tried dozing a bit, thinking he'd wake up in his own bed again, but no dice. 

Night stretches to early morning and before Harry knows it, the sun is out. He hears the first cars start to drive by, the birds humming outside. The world is waking up and Louis has yet to come home. 

With nothing left to do, and no longer feeling drained, Harry climbs the stairs to take a shower. If this is his house, and he's almost positive it is, then he doubts he would be mad at himself for making himself at home.

Whilst in the shower a thought occurs to him, more horrific than any he'd had thus far, and almost as soon as it passes through his mind Harry shoves it away out of his thoughts. There's confused, and then there's _bleak_ , and the thought is too bleak to consider. 

_Everything's gonna be okay_ , he tries to tell himself one last time. _And there's no reason to question why Louis isn't here_.

**TBC**


End file.
